Lite-Brite towns and roads like veins / by vanessa

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Once a week most weeks of the year this is my view. In a Lite-Brite town with roads like veins, I picture a family I've never met before sitting in their newly-remodeled family room half-watching Two and a Half Men on a 52-inch plasma screen: a mother plowing through two healthy scoops of Breyer's reduced-fat vanilla bean ice cream, her husband, father of her two children, present in physics only, reclining in his leather recliner, their eldest son, dreaming of his first kiss to the half man on TV, wondering if anyone can read his thoughts, as the youngest, born eight years after his brother, sets a dishtowel on fire just to watch it burn.